from here to eternity by caitlin doughty

She argues that our expensive, impersonal system fosters a corrosive fear of death that hinders our ability to cope and mourn. She introduces deathcare innovators researching body composting and green burial, and examines how varied traditions, from Mexico’s Días de los Muertos to Zoroastrian sky burial help us see our own death customs in a new light.ĭoughty contends that the American funeral industry sells a particular―and, upon close inspection, peculiar―set of 'respectful' rites: bodies are whisked to a mortuary, pumped full of chemicals, and entombed in concrete.

With boundless curiosity and gallows humor, Doughty vividly describes decomposed bodies and investigates the world’s funerary history. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved-ones’ bones from cremation ashes. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years.

From Here to Eternity is an immersive global journey that introduces compelling, powerful rituals almost entirely unknown in America. The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with 'dignity.'įascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead.

From here to eternity by caitlin doughty